Deeplinks Blog posts about Social Networks

Twitter has released a new transparency report. The company—which scored five stars in our latest “Who Has Your Back?” report—blogged about the release, wrote that “[p]roviding this insight is simply the right thing to do, especially in an age of increasing concerns about government surveillance.” More than thirty Internet companies now publish transparency reports.

For the lastthreeyears, EFF has greeted the holiday season by publishing a list of things we'd like to see happen in the coming year. Sometimes these are actions we'd like to see taken by companies, and sometimes our wishes are aimed at governments, but we also include actions everyday people can take to advance our digital civil liberties. This year has seen great progress in areas such as transparency reports and encrypting digital communications. We want to build on that progress in 2015.

For years, pundits and scholars have warned of the implications of social media companies capitulating to foreign governments, handing over user data or censoring content. Facebook’s latest government requests report, released late last week, demonstrates why: as governments grow aware of the fact that stifling speech is as easy as submitting an order to a corporation, the number of those orders will drastically increase.

The latest report shows that Turkey and Pakistan in particular are keen to exploit Facebook’s willingness to respond to legal orders from countries where they are not legally required to do so. While the largest number of censorship requests came from India (where Facebook has a large presence), Turkey and Pakistan weren’t far behind with 1893 and 1773 requests for content removal respectively.

Facebook scolded the Drug Enforcement Administration this week after learning that a narcotics agent had impersonated a user named Sondra Arquiett on the social network in order to communicate and gather intelligence on suspects. In a strongly worded letter to DEA head Michele Leonhart, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan reiterated that not only did the practice explicitly violate the site’s terms of service, but threatened Facebook’s trust-based social ecosystem.

Sullivan writes:

Facebook has long made clear that law enforcement authorities are subject to these policies. We regard the conduct to be a knowing and serious breach of Facebook’s terms and policies, and the account created by the agent in the Arquiett matter has been disabled.